can i somehow configure pulumi to use the kubectl created secret so it would pull from the relevant repo?

I'm a little confused by this question. Are you asking how to configure your k8s cluster to have the right credentials to pull images when it runs workloads, or are you trying to configure permissions for a host that's running pulumi?

@brave-ambulance-98491 Apologies for the confusion, I am asking how to configure my pulumi deployment to use images from ECR specifically for this example: https://github.com/pulumi/examples/tree/master/kubernetes-py-guestbook for example:

container = ContainerArgs(
    name=name,
    image=image,
    resources=resources or ResourceRequirementsArgs(
        requests={
            "cpu": "100m",
            "memory": "100Mi"
        },
    ),
    ports=[ContainerPortArgs(container_port=p) for p in ports] if ports else None,
)

the image that is being pulled by this code

Cool, that's going to be an image that's being pulled by your Kubernetes cluster (the container is being run in your cluster). The two links I sent should get you set up there!